CommentaryStephen Gwynn: After self-government [had been] a few years at work, creating order out of the chaos which had been handed over, I saw with pleasure a letter from Plunkett declaring that the Irish Free State had produced in Patrick Hogan the best Minister of Agriculture in Europe.

Nicholas Allen, Free Statement: Censorship and the Irish Statesman, in Last Before America - Irish and American Writing, ed. Fran Brearton & Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 2001), remarks that a interview with Patrick Hogan, minister for Agriculture, was conducted for the Irish Statesman (27 Oct. 1928) by Simone Téry - Russells French confidante - and that Hogan later declared in the Dail debate on Censorship that it would be extremely difficult [in this country] to get anyone ... fit to censor books. Also notes that Hogan's Agricultural Bill, passed without division in 1927, had been praised by the Irish Statesman. (Allen, op. cit., p.92.) Further quotes Hogan's witty attack on Fianna Fail during the debate: I listened to this debate very carefully. Wew were all very virtuous and anxious to make the other fellow virtuous ... I suppose the next time we are taking an oath we will call it an empty formula and pust the bible two feet away. According to the Statesman's ensuing issue, Hogan was one of the ministers who listened to the Minister for Justice's defence of the Censorship Bill in scornful silence. (Idem.) Allen records the speculation that Hogan was charged with introducing the second reading of the Censorship Bill in October in an attempt to appease its literary critics (ibid., p.211, n.29.)